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Comment by mvkel | Hacker News Reader

Most content has been behind a paywall / login wall for years

Solvable problems (just login or pay). This is more than just blocking anonymous scrapers. Sites are blocking access to agents even when they have a proper "ticket" for access.

Sites are blocking access to agents even when they have a proper "ticket" for access.

(Shrug) Well, they must not want to sell anything to me.

This is not a battle that site owners want to fight. They may think it is, but they're horrifically wrong about that.

It's insane to me that people don't see that agents are going to be how you interact with your computer going forward, almost exclusively. The people who make things hard for agents are going to get eviscerated by the people who don't just make it easy for agents to do things, but market primarily to agents rather than humans.

> It's insane to me that people don't see that agents are going to be how you interact with your computer going forward, almost exclusively

You are in a bubble. Normal people (i.e. 99% of people) will not use these agentic tools:

* Some, probably most, won't use them because they don't trust them

* Agentic tool providers can't possibly supply everyone with their own free agentic tooling

* The vast majority of people will not pay providers what it will cost to run these agentic tools (or even anything)

* The vast majority of people cannot afford to buy their own hardware to run their own agentic tools in-house

* Agentic tooling is mostly useless for most people (who cares that it can check you into flights, most people don't have that kind of problem)

If that's true, why bother blocking the tools? Either they are useful in saving money (and more important, hassle), or they're not. If they're not useful, the problem simply won't materialize.

Because not blocking these tools causes additional operational costs.

For example, higher return rate for online shopping (because the tools didn't buy the correct thing, or maybe they bought something that they shouldn't have).

Or, the tool ignores the adverts on an ad-supported website, intended for humans, basically just adding costs for no benefit to the site.

Or, the tool wastes customer services' time on something that ultimately the agent's operator didn't even want in the first place.

They're just off the top of my head.

It's a mistake to think the sites have a choice. I'm hardly going to trust an AI agent to shop on my behalf if it isn't smart enough to operate the browser on my behalf in a way that's indistinguishable from a human. They're almost good enough to do that now; it won't be long.

So the end result will be that the sites spend money on bandwidth to shove ads and dark patterns at me, which I will never, ever see.

You'd think they'd understand who's going to end up with the power to say "No" here, but apparently not.

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